Food and other products are often packaged for retails purposes in flexible film. Such packages often include some type of feature to help the consumer in opening the package. Most easy-opening features include a cut or perforation formed through the film, and a tear tape, pull tab, header card, or the like affixed to the film in the vicinity of the cut or perforation. One known type of easy-opening feature, for example, includes a V-shaped notch formed in the film, and a pressure-sensitive tear tape adhered to the film over the V-shaped notch. The notch is cut into the film after the film has been wrapped about a product, and then the tear tape is applied to the film over the notch. Pulling the tear tape is supposed to initiate tearing of the film to create an opening therein.
When piercing through the film on a finished package containing the product, fragile products may be cut, damaged, or contaminated. The likelihood of this occurring is particularly great when the product does not have a consistent and predictable shape and/or orientation within the package. Thus, such methods are generally not suitable for irregularly shaped products.
When using an applied component such as a header card, adhesive label, tear tape, or the like, it is sometimes difficult to register the applied component with the cuts or perforations in the film. If the applied component is incorrectly registered, the opening mechanism may not work properly.
Some applied components can easily become inadvertently detached from the package during shipping and handling, for example by being snagged when the package is handled. This can compromise the package integrity and may also compromise integrity or freshness of the product. Even if the package and product integrity are not compromised, the easy-opening feature will no longer work as intended, and the consumer may have to resort to secondary means such as scissors or a knife to open the package.
Many existing easy-opening features are limited in versatility in that a tearing is initiated in only one direction. If that tearing should fail for any reason, the consumer often is not left with any other convenient means of opening the package and again may have to resort to using scissors or a knife. As an example of such a failure, the above-noted V-shaped notch is intended to initiate a tear about equal in width to that of the notch, and the desire is for that tear to continue along the full length of the package. However, frequently what happens is that the edges of the tear soon converge, resulting in only a small sliver of film being removed along with the tear tape, pull tab, or label, thus producing only a small opening in the film. It can be difficult to find that opening after the label is removed.